The Parasite Divine

By A.E. Bayne

Inhabiting the primal room
of the rolling life womb -
not beautiful, but wondrous,
expanding through the secretions
of an organic pulse.

Made of us
and nourished on my blood,
devouring our genetic codes...
cloning.

I transport
the parasite divine,
but experience the longing
to touch human -
to feel the sun-warmed skin of peaches.

WELCOME!

A Love Poem

A.E. Bayne

Would the sky move more to your shape
if I looked upon its vast body with the reverence I give to you in my heart?
If I were to give the pool a bow,
a genuflection of faith,
would it breath ripples to form your exquisite face?
Would a strand of hair moving through the wind
become the last thought that you gave to me,
or I to you;
or would it snake away again, moving just beyond my fingertips?
Tonight I am listening,
as a shell to an ear sounds slick licking my eardrum,
hearing it speak your name.

Crimson Sheets

By A.E. Bayne

We bear the sins of our fathers as crimson sheets.
Dreams wax and wane…
awaken to whitewashed tiles,
cozened to the idea that we are someone
protesting a great irreconcilable,
we are one and alone.
Perhaps Babel was truth
or chance we play the fool.
Humanity split, indifferent –
they are rusty days
far from our inherited boldness.

Child Prodigy

By A.E. Bayne

tiny yellow-green

brush stroked buds.

remind me of crayons

in Pennsylvania

when I was Monet

as a child.

a child

with greenness.

unknown Monet

or budding

Pennsylvania

hills, only colored crayons.

painting with crayons

made me a child -

not in Pennsylvania

but in the chilly green

budding

years. Monet

knows Monet,

but I have lost the crayons

whose waxy buds

create the child.

always was green

first from the box in Pennsylvania.

definitive Pennsylvania

and ever Monet,

the green

fades, melting crayon

tears of the child

like flower buds.

wither the buds

for a grave in Pennsylvania

to the child

Monet

whose box of crayons

lost its green.

Water Babies

By A.E. Bayne

Watch them float and kick like bloated, brackish fish -
every muscle tense, their infant bodies sink and bob.
Eyes bulges of fleshy jelly,
the pupil-iris pair flashing, wildly blind and searching for a side.
Small faces roundly taunt, like the mouths of ghosts at Halloween,
learning that the human body is not unlike dead wood in water.
Delicate pink mouths now garish purple with chilled corpus wanton,
as chests heave for one element, but two unwittingly enter
on this aquatic roller coaster ride.

Tree...By A.E. Bayne

In a Dream...By A.E. Bayne

The Weeping Woman

Before the Dark Days Settle

By A.E. Bayne

Beyond the half-shade of the autumn wood,
a silver dollar sun weaves a drunkard's dance.
The air breathes through us
clearing hot humid thoughts,
and sets 'round, all smoky logs and ash leaves.
Jackets zipped to the chin,
hoods clasped tight around ears,
we trudge through the vocal foliage.
Cracking and snapping, great arthritic bones
forest speak.
Before the dark days settle,
before the great Earth slumbers,
walk with me down the mountain
until the dull moon is a wavering wedge.
Hold me with your tongue
that forms the most of my desire,
I seek your linguistic touch.

Reflections on "The Persistence of Memory"

By A.E. Bayne

A fine and frivolous fantasy is time,
Which whips around the glass, boldly sublime.
Ignoring all protesting, the milieu
Fights any wageless war that might ensue.
Never ebbing, like a sentient wave,
Another fickle lunar escapade.
Its steady hands ever blindly gripping
Undiscovered threads frail from the ripping.

Pieces from "A Creation Story"...A.E. Bayne

Moon slowly cloaked her brightly swollen belly

and bid her star children a fond farewell.

They hung in space like glistening netherworld fairies

folding in upon themselves until the next night's shining adventure.

Rainbow reached from earth to sky

and back to earth she fell.

She spread her coat of peacock colors

and hues began to spill like smooth oils from a genie's bottle.

Sun readied himself to color the day,

as morning shadows wrestled with sinuous, yawning beasts,

all awaiting his royal pageant.

Mother

by A.E. Bayne

Mother is a stuffed dumpling
who knows brown welts don't swell.
Broad-backed with buckled feet,
she finds heart in each beat.

Mother jumps rainbows and combs bats from the rafters.
She is bad when the snow bites.
Mother crisses crosses and such;
she heaps on a lot of heavy.
Her cost is in pennies;
she pays in quarters.
Her roses in crochet double valentines.

Xaviar

by A.E. Bayne

Dimple-bodied boy
smiles at the sense in everything.
Frumpy bed-head boy with the get-up-and-go style,
You bring me down.
Those eyes that are mine
and that mouth that is his
make a you that is yours.
Funky bright apostrophe of me
doubles and doubles my humanity.

City Block...A.E. Bayne

Stream

by A.E. Bayne

Rambling mind roads
lead lower.
Meandering mind,
my heart eats you.
Roads lead lower to minnows' beds -
rolling matters.
Rolling mind,
my heart eats you in whole pieces.
Roads lead lower to minnows' beds
through tumbling pebble streams minds flow.
My heart eats you in whole pieces. Each
road leads lower to minnows' beds through
tumbling pebble streams minds flow
as gray-green moss.
Free mind, my heart eats you in whole pieces
each time.

Medusa...A.E. Bayne

Procrastination...A.E. Bayne

she...

by A.E. Bayne

Deconstructed,
she is a cobalt button among copious blades of grass -
well rounded smooth with four holes void of thread.
Finding her, a child fancies her electric hue
and places her in its mouth
swallowing.

Untitled

By A.E. Bayne

Your decisive marks grip me for a glimpse of you.
Finding those things you left at inconsequential moments,
thoughts in mid-sentence.
What were you thinking when you picked up the pen to write the note?
What were you going to buy with that last dollar you carried?
A lifeline to the material, the physical?
What were you dreaming when you were dying?
Sometimes I see you in my words.

Poppy Flowers...A.E. Bayne

Drawers and Space

By A.E. Bayne

The drawers that you keep within cabinets, dressers, bureaus, and buffets;
amid card tables, nightstands, and silver chests,
are corpses stained, polished with names of what they once were:
cherry, oak, pine, walnut, maple.

Yours is a wood-scented home,a copse furnished with behemoths
filling noses and rooms with equal oppressiveness.
Their drawers encase the minutia of sentiment, personalities, and permanence.

Beliefs are buried in the sheer pages of family bibles,
under long-grayed photographs,
tossed with paper clips and rubber bands,
and folded between t-shirts and undergarments.

Thoughts, plans, desires, banalities are captured in tight, dark repositories;
their smooth surfaces glazed with circumstances untold.

Closed, crushed, stuffed, precisely set into drawers.

Grab handle or knob, yank wide the cavernous hollows.
Fling them open and explore.
Shake out your secrets frozen in space;
Truth extrapolated.

Barn Trippin'

By A.E. Bayne

In a barn upstate
the Technicolor bus demands, "Further!"
Motionless and confined by time,
yet timeless.
Bold paint splatteredlike a Pollock original,
with years of hay mold and rat printsand dust fairies
fallen deadupon its promises of freedom's ecstasies.
Sunlight through the mud-caked window
threatens to stir them to life,
but none respire in the even solitude.
A merry bus, overhauled,
its silence ever more profound.